If VENGEANCE IS MINE
Chan propels thrilling political drama ‘Foreigner’
you think it might be fun to see action-movie superstar Jackie Chan play the 61-year-old owner of a small London restaurant who goes all Rambo on newly reborn IRA terrorists and their political bosses, you need to see “The Foreigner” tout suite.
Directed by Bond-movie veteran Martin Cambell (“Casino Royale”) and based on “The Chinaman,” a 1992 novel by English author Stephen Leather, the film tells the gripping, fast-paced, occasionally amusing story of one insignificant-looking man’s crusade to get his revenge upon the terrorists who bombed a London bank, killing his adolescent daughter (Katie Leung, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”), the only family he had left after his wife and two other daughters were killed fleeing the East to get to Western Europe.
After the explosion, Chan’s avenger Quan Ngoc Minh, who is in fact a Vietnamese war veteran (the casting of Chan, who is Chinese, has caused some stir among Vietnamese on Twitter), visits the office of Scotch-slugging Deputy Minister Liam Hennessy (Irishman Pierce Brosnan, obviously relishing playing an Irish villain). As usual, the small-statured, aging, soft-spoken Asian is underestimated by Hennessy and his glaring, paramilitary goons until the old man blows up Hennessy’s office bathroom with what appears to be two bottles of lemonade, a book of matches and a piece of string and beats a few goons to a bloody pulp.
The game is afoot, indeed. FYI: Brosnan and director Campbell made “GoldenEye” (1995) together, one of the best of the Brosnan Bond films.
“The Foreigner” involves a lot of dirty politics and back and forth telephone intrigue between Hennessy and a British elected official (Lia Williams), as well as a manhunt headed by stalwart British Commander Richard Bromley (Ray Fearon) and a bit of hankypanky going on between Hennessy’s beautiful neglected wife (a captivating Orla Brady) and his strapping, Royal Irish Regiment veteran nephew Sean (Rory Fleck Byrne).
“The Foreigner” has something for everyone, but most of all for the fans of Jackie Chan-style fight scenes and Rambo-like techniques for making Quan’s pursuers become the quarry themselves.
Chan is all stricken stoicism and occasional tears as Quan, especially in a scene in which he cauterizes a bullet wound Rambostyle. But you can also see a glint in Chan’s eye as Quan eludes 20 guards and blows up yet another building on Hennessy’s remote Irish farm. Bromley and his people, meanwhile, are also after the terrorists to stop them before they plant a laptop bomb on an airplane.
Right down to that nervous score by Cliff Martinez (“Drive”) and sleek visuals by David Tattersall (“Romeo & Juliet”), “The Foreigner” has all the virtues of a piece of first-class pulp moviemaking, and it deserves to be the sleeper box-office hit of this somnolent fall movie season.
(“The Foreigner” contains violence, profanity and sexually suggestive scenes and language.)